CANR
WORK TITLE: Liars
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.sarahmanguso.com/
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 334
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born February 12, 1974, in MA; married; children: one son.
EDUCATION:Harvard University, B.A.; University of Iowa, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, adjunct assistant professor; CalArts, Los Angeles, CA, instructor; Antioch University, teacher of creative writing. Worked as an instructor at University of Iowa, Iowa City, and New School University. Has also taught at Columbia University, Princeton University, and the Otis College of Art and Design. Visiting writer at several U.S. colleges and universities.
AWARDS:Pushcart Prize, 2003; Hodder fellowship, Princeton University, 2004; Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2008; fellowships at Bread Loaf Writers Conference, MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo; Salon What to Read Awards, 2012, for The Guardians; Guggenheim fellowship, 2012.
WRITINGS
Work represented in anthologies, including The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, The Better of McSweeney’s, Pushcart Prize XXVII, and four editions of Best American Poetry. Contributor of poetry and prose to periodicals, including American Poetry Review, Believer, Boston Review, Conjunctions, London Review of Books, McSweeney’s, New Republic, and Paris Review. Author’s works have been translated into a dozen languages.
SIDELIGHTS
Sarah Manguso is an American poet with a “startling, disturbing, and original voice,” according to Carl Phillips, writing in the American Poetry Review. Manguso’s first collection, The Captain Lands in Paradise: Poetry, begins with a quote from the log of explorer Christopher Columbus. That and the title indicated to Electronic Poetry Review website contributor Charlotte Mandel that the thematic concerns of this debut collection deal with “exploration, motion and discovery.” Such a theme is appropriate, Mandel thought, for “a poet … well-equipped to embark on a voyage where a rationalist pilot-consciousness takes direction from a willingly surreal imagination.” Manguso describes some of the verse in the collection as “essays” or “narratives.” Thus, for example, “Address to Winnie in Paris” is in the form of a letter to a stranger encouraging her to begin a romance. Other notable poems in the collection are “American Reverie” and “Social Theory.” Mandel felt that each piece “is galvanized by a powerful image,” and that the entire collection demonstrates that Manguso is “a poet worthy of our attention, capable of the language of motion which stirs thought and feeling together.” Similar praise came from a Publishers Weekly contributor, who thought the poet “accomplishes a great deal” with this first publication.
The poems in Manguso’s second poetry collection, Siste Viator, “crackle with wicked fire,” according to Paul Guest in the online Diagram. The title of the book is the Latin phrase “traveler, halt,” which was used as the usual opening for inscriptions on Roman gravestones. In this collection, Manguso’s poems seem intended to take on the gravity of epitaphs, and her writing reportedly becomes more epigrammatic and aphoristic. Guest singled out such poems as “Kitty in the Snow” and “Asking for More,” noting that “there is mortal gravity here but also a kind of cheeky weirdness.” Guest concluded: “Manguso’s best poems see with a kind of double vision, of which seemingly effortless poetry can be made.”
The Two Kinds of Decay
Manguso has also written four prose books, among them Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, a collection of short stories, and The Two Kinds of Decay, a memoir about her years battling an extremely rare neurological disease. Manguso first noticed symptoms during her junior year at Harvard; these included trouble breathing, numbness, and paralysis. The diagnosis was chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (sometimes called CIDP), a condition in which the immune system attacks the protective sheath around the peripheral nerves. Manguso spent long periods in the hospital during which she endured frightening and painful treatments such as apheresis, which removed her blood plasma and replaced it with donors’ plasma. Only after many years of this treatment did Manguso receive newer and less invasive therapies involving steroids and gammaglobulin. Eventually, the poet recovered sufficiently to return to college and resume her ambitions, but the nine years of debilitating illness that had robbed her of her youth contributed to crippling depression and alcohol abuse, which Manguso addresses with as much candor as she does her illness. “This is suffering’s lesson,” she writes: “Pay attention … to pay attention is to love everything.”
Reviewers described The Two Kinds of Decay as an unflinching look at illness, suffering, and the frustrations of communicating with medical practitioners. Much of the book focuses on the exact words through which to convey the intensely personal experience of pain. Manguso opts against most attempt to employ metaphor, deciding instead to make her language as clinically accurate as possible. Among the reviewers who commented on this approach was online Slate contributor Amanda Fortini, who observed that the author “pushes beyond the familiar confrontation between doctor and patient to explore the linguistic confusion at the heart of the power struggle. … Channeling the emphatic voice of the doctors who discount a sensation she knows to be real, Manguso vents a writer’s frustration at having her words for her somatic reality dismissed.”
Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Emily Mitchell also noted the author’s “search for adequate descriptions of things heretofore unnamed and unknown.” But Mitchell also appreciated Manguso’s dark humor and “keen sense of the absurdities that accompany severe illness.” These qualities, wrote the reviewer, make The Two Kinds of Decay a “remarkable, clear-eyed account that turns horror into something humane and beautiful.”
“For years I avoided writing about it,” Manguso said of her illness in an interview with online Smith contributor Adam Krefman. “The subject seemed garish, obvious, banal, embarrassingly personal. Then, in 2006, I wrote an essay about social class that mentioned the tube I wore in my heart. When it was done, I knew I had to write more about that tube. One chapter led to another, and the book got written.”
The Two Kinds of Decay was cited in the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the best nonfiction books of the year, and in the New York Times Sunday Book Review as an Editors’ Choice. In 2008 Manguso received the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Ongoingness
Manguso followed The Two Kinds of Decay with a second memoir, The Guardians, which reflects on the suicide of a friend. In the book Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, Manguso presents an autobiographical essay that reflects on her impulse to keep a diary. The author notes that she has kept a diary for a quarter of a century, and she has written in it every single day. The result is an opus that has surpassed 800,000 words, and in her essay, Manguso states that she largely kept a record of her days in an attempt to give meaning to her life and to wrestle with her anxiety about mortality and the passage of time. Rather than present excerpts from the diary, Manguso discusses her diary-keeping process and the meaning it holds for her. She also addresses the birth of her first child and explains that motherhood changed her relationship to the passage of time, and thus to her diary as well.
According to a Publishers Weekly critic, Ongoingness “is both grounding and heady, the spark of a larger, important conversation that makes readers all the more eager for her future output.” Commending the volume in her online Full-Stop assessment, Laura Creste remarked: “Even though Ongoingness is not my favorite book of hers, I will read anything Sarah Manguso writes. I am so charmed by her wryness, a veering toward understatement. … Reading this essay gives me hope that I will outgrow my fear of death. You can see how Manguso comes to terms with mortality over the course of her memoirs. … I still get frustrated when I’m told that time is not linear. My perception of time moving in a line is all that matters to me; I was never a good philosophy student. So thank god, or whomever, that poetry and good essays exist.” Jonathon Sturgeon, writing in the online Flavorwire, was also impressed, and he stated that “ Ongoingness is an imperfect book, but not in the way that the self is imperfect. … The book is imperfect in the way a mirror, cracked or whole, is imperfect: it can only reflect your present state right back at you. But in fragments, in strange poetic moments, Manguso is somehow able to trap herself—past, present, projected toward death—in the reflection. It’s then her book becomes a mirror that can tell time.”
300 Arguments
In 300 Arguments: Essays, Manguso offers a series of brief and condensed meditations, memories, and aphorisms. Manguso writes about performance anxiety as a writer, and as a wife and mother. Re her writing career, Manguso admits that she has written whole books to avoid writing other books, and she also comments on the number of hours a book costs her. Other topics the author addresses range from lover to desire and from luck to envy. Manguso’s essays can be as brief as one or two sentences, yet each cuts to the heart of painful realities. Thus, the book lies somewhere between poetry, essay and memoir.
According to a Publishers Weekly critic, the “format tricks readers into skimming quickly, but it will require multiple rereadings to absorb the book’s rewarding wisdom.” Michele Moses, writing in the Nation Online, lauded Manguso’s efforts, and she found that the author’s “subjects are relentlessly heavy: disease, grief, disappointment, and the ephemerality of human existence. Manguso’s cures for despair sound a lot like its causes. Maybe her intent is akin to what my psychologist friend once told me: If you ever encounter someone on a ledge, you shouldn’t tell them how much they have to live for, but rather that their feeling of hopelessness is justified. Maybe it’s only the sharing of despair that brings relief.”
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Very Cold People
Manguso’s Very Cold People, published in 2022, began as a kind of memoir but then developed into a novel, marking Manguso’s first foray into fiction. In an interview with Literary Hub, Manguso described her process: “I started with memoir, I started with what I remembered, and when I ran out of material for the structure, I made a lateral step into sociology.” Using her study of race, sexual violence, and trauma as a foundation, Manguso wrote the story of Ruthie, a woman who looks back on her childhood and adolescence, as well as the dark history of the small New England town where she grew up. The novel focuses particularly on Ruthie’s relationship with her mother and how Ruthie comes to recognize the trauma her mother suffered.
Michele Filgate, writing in the Washington Post, acknowledged that “It’s impossible to read Manguso’s novel without wondering how much of the writer’s own life is in it,” given Manguso’s previous memoirs. Filgate, however, noted that the book “gets at larger truths about countless girls caught in the cycle of generational trauma.” Filgate also appreciated how the book portrays “the chilliness and reservation of certain New Englanders” and how Manguso captures “the fears surrounding girlhood with a blistering clarity.” Alexandra Jacobs, in the New York Times, praised Manguso for her “compact and beautiful” writing and how she captures “certain aspects of New England . . . with absolute, flinty accuracy.” Jacobs also highlighted the novel’s theme of how women are “torn down by violation, sexual and otherwise.”
“A taut, blisteringly smart novel, both measured and rageful,” wrote a reviewer in Kirkus Reviews. They praised Manguso for being a “lovely writer about unlovely things” and stated that she “depicts her protagonist’s quiet agony with a poet’s eye.” Damon Galgut, in TLS: Times Literary Supplement, called the novel “disquieting” and its writing “skilful and exact.”
Liars
Manguso continued on the path of fiction with her next novel, Liars. In this outing, the focus is on marriage and how being a wife and mother makes it exceedingly difficult to also be an artist. The protagonist, Jane, is a writer who falls in love with John, who is a visual artist. Although they think they want the same thing in their marriage and family, his ambition and competitiveness and then the demands of motherhood start crowding out her ability to pursue her own passion. How she responds to that and especially the way she lies to herself about her situation form the crux of the novel. “The narrative showcases how much self-deception is requires to keep a struggling marriage together,” wrote a reviewer in Kirkus Reviews. They praised Manguso’s writing as “driven by tart, brutal sentences” and called the result a “bracing story of a woman on the verge.”
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BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Manguso, Sarah, The Two Kinds of Decay, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2008.
PERIODICALS
American Book Review, January-February, 2005, Kevin Prufer, review of Free Radicals: American Poets before Their First Books, p. 11.
American Poetry Review, May, 2002, Carl Phillips, review of The Captain Lands in Paradise: Poetry, p. 45.
Booklist, May 1, 2008, Whitney Scott, review of The Two Kinds of Decay, p. 60.
Boston Review, summer, 2003, review of The Captain Lands in Paradise, p. 59.
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2008, review of The Two Kinds of Decay; December 15, 2011, review of The Guardians; February 1, 2022, review of Very Cold People; June 1, 2024, review of Liars.
Library Journal, March 1, 2008, Fran Mentch, review of The Two Kinds of Decay, p. 101.
New Yorker, April 30, 2012, review of The Guardians, p. 73.
New York Times, February 13, 2015, “Mostly True,” p. 242; March 4, 2015, Dwight Garner, “Introspecting about Introspection”; February 7, 2022, Alexandra Jacobs, February 7, 2022, “Finding Beauty in a Painful Childhood, p. C6(L).
New York Times Book Review, June 22, 2008, Emily Mitchell, “Sick Days,” review of The Two Kinds of Decay, p. 19.
Parnassus: Poetry in Review, annual, 2006, review of The Captain Lands in Paradise, p. 241.
Publishers Weekly, November 19, 2001, review of The Captain Lands in Paradise, p. 65; March 13, 2006, review of Siste Viator, p. 43; April 21, 2008, review of The Two Kinds of Decay, p. 46; January 16, 2012, review of The Guardians, p. 49; January 12, 2015, review of Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, p. 51; December 5, 2016, review of 300 Arguments: Essays.
San Francisco Chronicle, July 13, 2008, Vanessa Hua, review of The Two Kinds of Decay.
TLS: Times Literary Supplement, April 15, 2022, Damon Galgut, “Patterns in the Carpet: A Visit with “The Exhausted Girl Who Once Was Me,'” p. 17.
Washington Post, February 7, 2022, Michele Filgate, “Book World: ‘Very Cold People’ Relays the Realities of Girlhood with Stunning Clarity.”
ONLINE
Bat Segundo Show, http://www.edrants.com/ (January 21, 2009), author interview.
Diagram, http://www.thediagram.com/ (October 25, 2006), Paul Guest, review of Siste Viator.
Electronic Poetry Review, http://www.epoetry.org/ (October 25, 2006), Charlotte Mandel, review of The Captain Lands in Paradise.
Flavorwire, http://flavorwire.com/ (March 11, 2015), Jonathon Sturgeon, review of Ongoingness.
From the Fishouse, http://fishousepoems.org/ (December 27, 2005), author profile.
Full-Stop, http://www.full-stop.net/ (March 30, 2015), Laura Creste, review of Ongoingness.
January Online, http://www.januarymagazine.com/ (January 21, 2009), Diane Leach, review of The Two Kinds of Decay.
Literary Hub, https://lithub.com (March 3, 2022), Maris Kreizman, “Sarah Manguso on the Coldness and Quietness of New England Girlhood.”
Nation Online, https://www.thenation.com/ (October 4, 2017), Michele Moses, review of 300 Arguments.
Readings Website, http://www.readings.com.au/ (September 29, 2008), Annie Condon, author interview.
Sarah Manguso website, https://www.sarahmanguso.com/ (July 2, 2024).
Shipman Agency, https://www.theshipmanagency.com (July 2, 2024), author profile.
Slate, http://www.slate.com/ (July 7, 2008), Amanda Fortini, review of The Two Kinds of Decay.
Smith, http://www.smithmag.net/ (June 3, 2008), Adam Krefman, author interview.
Stop Smiling, http://www.stopsmilingonline.com/ (January 21, 2009), Nate Martin, review of The Two Kinds of Decay.
Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine Online, http://yjhm.yale.edu/ (November 17, 2008), Howard Spiro, review of The Two Kinds of Decay. *
Sarah Manguso is the author of nine books, most recently the novel Very Cold People, which was named a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award.
Her next novel, Liars, is forthcoming in summer 2024 from Hogarth Books and Picador UK.
Her other books include a story collection, two poetry collections, and four acclaimed works of nonfiction: 300 Arguments, Ongoingness, The Guardians, and The Two Kinds of Decay, which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize.
Her poems have appeared in four editions of the Best American Poetry series, and her essays have appeared in Frieze, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, and many other places.
Her work has been recognized by an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, and the Rome Prize, and her writing has been translated into twelve languages.
She grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing at Antioch University and gives manuscript consultations through the Shipman Agency.
Sarah Manguso
Sarah Manguso's debut novel, Very Cold People, is forthcoming on 2/8/22. Her nonfiction books include 300 Arguments, a work of aphoristic autobiography; Ongoingness, a meditation on motherhood and time; The Guardians, an investigation of friendship and suicide; and The Two Kinds of Decay, a memoir of her experience with a chronic autoimmune disease.
Her books have been translated into Chinese, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, and her work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize. She lives in Los Angeles.
Genres: Literary Fiction
New and upcoming books
July 2024
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Liars
Novels
Very Cold People (2022)
Liars (2024)
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Collections
The Captain Lands in Paradise (poems) (2002)
Siste Viator (poems) (2006)
The Small Box of Short Stories (2007) (with Dave Eggers and Deb Olin Unferth)
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Non fiction hide
The Two Kinds of Decay (2008)
The Guardians (2012)
300 Arguments (2017)
Ongoingness (2019)
Sarah Manguso is the author of the acclaimed debut novel, Very Cold People (Hogarth, 2022), which the New York Times called, “masterly.” She is also the award-winning author of 300 Arguments (Graywolf, 2017), an NPR Best Book of 2017; Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (Graywolf, 2015), a New York Times Editor’s Choice; The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend (FSG, 2012), a Salon Top Ten Book of 2012; The Two Kinds of Decay: A Memoir (FSG, 2009), a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year; Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (McSweeney’s 2007), a Los Angeles Times Critics' Choice; and the poetry collections Siste Viator (Four Way, 2006), and The Captain Lands in Paradise (Alice James, 2002), a Village Voice book of the year. Her next novel is Liars. to be published by Hogarth in July, 2024. A master of the unconventional in multiple genres, Kirkus Review praised Manguso as "a Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis.”
In discussing form and structure in 300 Arguments with Vela, Manguso notes, "I think some of my best work comes from looking at something so small in size or duration or emotional register you can barely see it. It’s not what people would call plot-driven. I’ve never really been interested in plot, reading it or writing it. And I have a terrible time following plots too, which can be deeply frustrating. But I’ve come to realize that I’m not the only person with this problem."
Manguso’s work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, and the Rome Prize, and her books have been translated into five languages. Her poems have won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in several editions of the Best American Poetry series, and her essays have appeared in Harper's, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review. Educated at Harvard and the Iowa Writers Workshop, she lives in Los Angeles and currently teaches in the low-residency MFA program at New England College.
Sarah Manguso
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sarah Manguso (born 1974) is an American writer and poet.[1] In 2007, she was awarded the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her memoir The Two Kinds of Decay (2008), was named an "Editors’ Choice" title by the New York Times Sunday Book Review[2] and a 2008 "Best Nonfiction Book of the Year" by the San Francisco Chronicle.[3] Her book Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (2015) was also named a New York Times "Editors’ Choice."[4] Her debut novel, Very Cold People, was published by Penguin in 2022.[5]
Life
She was born and raised in Wellesley, near Boston, Massachusetts.[6] Manguso received her B.A. from Harvard University and her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has taught creative writing at the Pratt Institute and in the graduate program at The New School.[7] She lives in Los Angeles, and teaches in the MFA program at Antioch University and New England College.
Her poems and prose have appeared in Harper's,[8] the New York Times Magazine,[9] and The Paris Review.[10] Her poems have appeared in four editions of the Best American Poetry series.
Awards and honors
2012: Salon What To Read Awards, The Guardians[11]
2012: Guggenheim Fellowship[12]
2011: Wellcome Trust Book Prize, shortlist, The Two Kinds of Decay[13]
2008: Rome Prize[14]
2003: Hodder Fellowship[15]
Published works
Prose
Liars (Hogarth, 2024)
Very Cold People (Hogarth, 2022)
300 Arguments (Graywolf, 2017)
Ongoingness: The End of a Diary (Graywolf, 2015)
The Guardians: An Elegy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012)
The Two Kinds of Decay (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008)
Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (McSweeney's Books, 2007)
Poetry
Siste Viator (Four Way Books, 2006)
The Captain Lands in Paradise (Alice James Books, 2002)
Sarah Manguso on the Coldness and Quietness of New England Girlhood
In Conversation with Maris Kreizman on The Maris Review Podcast
By The Maris Review
March 3, 2022
This week on The Maris Review, Sarah Manguso joins Maris Kreizman to discuss her debut novel, Very Cold People, out now from Hogarth.
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On finding the book’s focus:
SM: The central problem for me about the writing of Very Cold People is that I initially thought of it as yet another essayistic, autobiographical nonfiction book, of which I’d written several by then and felt very comfortable with. And yet I kept running up against this problem of having some of the ingredients of fully realized, multifaceted, narrative nonfiction but not all of the ingredients.
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So I started with memoir, I started with what I remembered, and when I ran out of material for the structure, I made a lateral step into sociology and started reading all of these books about in-between racial identity and racial expression in the 20th century in New England and about the provisional whiteness that so many immigrants and children of immigrants were forced into. I realized that the book I needed to write wasn’t about race except incidentally. What it was about was sexual violence and trauma. When you’re a woman, women’s accumulated sexual trauma and rage is a physical force in the world that you can feel. That is what I wanted to write about.
*
On the importance of perspective:
SM: There was not just a sense of coldness and weirdness and quietness that overshadowed everything when I was growing up [in Massachusetts], but there was also a sense that there was so much information missing. There were so many gaps and omissions. It wasn’t until I tried to write about it that I realized a) that’s the problem, and that’s why I haven’t been able to write about it, and b) that’s also the reason growing up everyone felt vigilant.
MK: Tell me about that as a writer of fiction. How do you convey to the reader that Ruthie is missing a lot of information?
SM: All I can do is just imagine Ruthie as this whole person, and then I can see just what she can see. That’s why it was important for me to use first person. I wanted Ruthie to see things that the other characters couldn’t see, but more importantly I wanted the reader to see that Ruthie couldn’t.
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*
Recommended Reading:
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti · Mean by Myriam Gurba
__________________________________
Sarah Manguso is the author of eight books. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, and the Rome Prize. Her work is regularly featured across The New York Times Magazine, O, and The New Yorker, among others. She grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in LA. Very Cold People is her first novel.
Manguso, Sarah LIARS Hogarth (Fiction None) $28.00 7, 23 ISBN: 9780593241257
A slow-motion portrait of a collapsing marriage.
Jane, the narrator of this piercing second novel by poet-essayist Manguso, is an accomplished writer who's fallen for John, a visual artist. From the start of their relationship, it's clear that he has a competitive streak that manifests as jealousy: When Jane wins an esteemed fellowship in Greece that John lost out on, he sulks and judges. In the years that follow, Jane episodically tracks how her life with John tightens (marriage, a child) and then asphyxiates--John is constantly short on cash, perpetually traveling and moving the family for work, absent when it comes to housework, and dismissive of Jane's ambitions. (Every time she mentions John taking another trip to Calgary, you can feel Jane grit her teeth a little harder.) Given the asymmetrical nature of the relationship, it's not hard to predict the novel's eventual arc. But given the title, it's also easy to wonder how much Jane might be eliding--though, more brutally, the narrative showcases how much self-deception is required to keep a struggling marriage together. Regardless, much like Very Cold People (2022), the novel is driven by tart, brutal sentences. Sometimes Jane is sarcastically furious ("Congratulations! You're forty years old and completely financially dependent on your husband!") or vividly resentful ("At supper, I bit down on a shard of glass he'd gotten into the stir-fry"). Most often, though, the tone reflects a kind of bitter self-resentment that an intelligent and self-possessed feminist has been roped into a conventional, sexist gender role. Catching herself defending John, she thinks, "That's just me projecting a pretty moral onto a story of deliberate harm."
A bracing story of a woman on the verge.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Manguso, Sarah: LIARS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795673897/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ba5d2ed0. Accessed 26 June 2024.
Byline: Michele Filgate
By Sarah Manguso
Hogarth. 208 pp. $26
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"How much of human life is lost in waiting!" Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote -- and perhaps no stretch of time can feel like more of a slog than the endless years of childhood and adolescence, two decades when every trivial and critical thing can take on extra weight and significance. It's a time of judgment, of other people and especially the self.
In Sarah Manguso's debut novel, "Very Cold People," a woman named Ruthie reflects on growing up in the aptly named fictional small town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts. "I like to visit with the exhausted girl who once was me. ... My life felt unreal and I felt half-invested. I felt indistinct, like someone else's dream." In looking back at that time, she can give herself a more definitive shape. (One can't help but think of the title of Eimear McBride's novel, "A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing.") It's impossible to read Manguso's novel without wondering how much of the writer's own life is in it. After all, her pithy and profound nonfiction (including "300 Arguments" and "Ongoingness") deals with time and mortality, among other topics, and she grew up in the same state. But to look for her between the lines misses the point in a book that gets at larger truths about countless girls caught in the cycle of generational trauma.
Manguso's attention to the chilliness and reservation of certain New Englanders crackles like a room-temperature beverage poured over ice. There are frigid temperatures outside and inside Ruthie's home. Her parents don't have a lot of money. They keep a "warming sweater" in the coat closet to save on utilities, and their daughter has to field phone calls from creditors.
Ruthie's short, vivid memories accumulate like snowflakes on a windowsill, many centered on her complicated relationship with her difficult mother, a woman whose coldness is its own distinctive parenting style. She's the kind of mother who makes her own better version of a scarf that Ruthie knits for her, then gives the inferior one back to her daughter. "After school I walked home from the bus stop," Ruthie recalls. "When I turned the corner to our street, I could see my mother waiting at the front window. Sometimes she made a face at me with puffy lips. I had braces on my teeth and she wanted me to know that I wasn't fooling anyone, trying to close my mouth around them. She wanted me to know I was ugly. She was helping me get ready for the world."
Ruthie points out the surreal qualities of living in a hometown laden with so much history, even stating that her own childhood felt like it took place in the 1600s, but she also fixates on more concrete and visceral moments. She thinks about the pleasure from "white wet snow squeaking against my teeth, melting clear in the heat of my mouth." Manguso captures both the repelling and beautiful aspects of girls' bodies: oily hair and fingernails "peeling off in layers like mica" -- what's visible and what shimmers right underneath the surface.
As Ruthie matures and learns about men taking advantage of or abusing her friends, it hits even harder when she realizes her own mother has suppressed traumatic experiences. What elevates "Very Cold People" above a traditional coming-of-age novel is Manguso's insistence on not being fooled by exterior markings -- historical houses with plaques on them, people with icy demeanors. The greatest threat to girls and women is the unwillingness to see what's right in front of you, barely obscured. "It was clear to me that what had happened to [my mother] wasn't rare but normal, that it was too common even to register as a story. It wasn't even a story at all."
But it is perhaps (BEGIN ITAL)the(END ITAL) story, what happens to girls and women behind closed doors and out in the open. How can mothers protect their daughters if they can't acknowledge what they went through? Especially when they live in small town America, in cloistered communities where seemingly endless cycles of violence and silence are reinforced by what has come before and what will happen again. In "Very Cold People," danger is everywhere: in old, looming homes, in schools, in psychiatric wards, even in seemingly lighthearted pursuits. "Crouched there at the side of the pool, I stared into the bright blue depths," Ruthie recalls. "Something unendurable lay at the bottom of that pool." Manguso portrays the fears surrounding girlhood with a blistering clarity.
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Michele Filgate is a writer and the editor of the essay collection "What My Mother and I Don't Talk About."
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
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Filgate, Michele. "Book World: 'Very Cold People' relays the realities of girlhood with stunning clarity." Washington Post, 7 Feb. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A692254148/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=29522840. Accessed 26 June 2024.
The memoirist Sarah Manguso's first novel is about a young girl's life in a small, snowy New England town.
VERY COLD PEOPLEBy Sarah Manguso191 pages. Hogarth. $26.
Anatomy may be destiny, as Freud said, but geography is also a major factor. The characters in Sarah Manguso's first novel, ''Very Cold People,'' seem quite literally shaped, like ice sculptures, by their habitation of a grim town in Massachusetts. Though fictional, this town reflects certain aspects of New England -- like the plaques on older houses and patrician dropped ''r''s -- with absolute, flinty accuracy.
The town's name, Waitsfield, suggests a place whose residents are dying for something to happen, or are just dying to leave. (No offense to the real-life Waitsfield, Vt., which looks charming.) ''Impatient little thing!'' thinks the protagonist, Ruthie, regarding a baby's grave in the old local cemetery. Her girlhood takes place in the 1980s, but its constraints and cruelties have a 17th-century vibe.
In Waitsfield, snow is common, a constant inconvenience; it ''accumulated like dust'' and ''fell in clumps'' and piled into driveways. Ruthie is coming of age and, we hope and trust, planning her escape, over the course of a spare 191 pages that would be even fewer if her story weren't narrated in short paragraphs separated by white space, like verses. Best known as a memoirist and essayist, Manguso also writes poetry, and this is apparent in her fiction. Though dealing with life's ugly, messy truths, her writing is compact and beautiful.
Ruthie is an only child, Jewish and Italian in a milieu where to be anything other than a Cabot, Lowell or some other Mayflower-y name is to be considered lesser, ''off white.'' In nursery school she has what is now known as selective mutism. ''I was simply a person who had nothing to share, nothing worth sharing,'' she remembers, pitying her ''big pink teacher'' for not understanding.
Her family does not live in abject poverty (her father is an accountant), but there is, palpably, not enough money for comfort. At their house, whose paint ''had faded to the color of dirty snow,'' baths can only be filled to the height of one's hand. Creditors phone constantly, calls that Ruthie has to screen. Everyone thrifts and regifts; gazing at pictures in catalogs and magazines often stand in for having the real thing. Food is processed or bruisedly past its prime, and iced tea and lemonade and milk are all made from powder, as if the sullied snow had edged all the way into the kitchen.
All this might be bearable for Ruthie, but her parents are wicked; not in the Massachusetts slang sense but like Roald Dahl villains: alternately absent or all too present in the claustrophobia of their modest circumstances. Headboards bang; scalps smell; private parts flash and flop. In ''Very Cold People,'' someone always seems to be bursting embarrassingly into the bathroom. There will be blood. Also phlegm, vomit and other bodily effusions. Even the relative refuge of the school auditorium during a play rehearsal evokes ''the inside of a slaughtered animal, all oxblood paint and maroon velveteen.''
Ruthie's mother in particular -- a depressive housewife who croaks and creaks from the bed she sometimes won't leave -- is a piece of work, class-conscious to the point of tacking other families' WASP-y wedding announcements onto the refrigerator, obsessed with sex and marriage. ''You look like a bride,'' she tells Ruthie in wonderment, wrapping her in eyelet sheets after an operation. She is also narcissistic and withholding, refusing to repeat the occasional affectionate gesture, like a stroke of the hair or playful spray with a garden hose; oblivious even to the color of her daughter's eyes, mocking how she looks in braces. ''She wanted me to know I was ugly,'' a resigned Ruthie concludes. ''She was helping me get ready for the world.''
Manguso is terribly poignant on little Ruthie's faith in a maternal love that isn't really there, and her dawning comprehension of what might have made it impossible. But in damning increments, she also shows how feminine identity in America can be built up with material objects -- dolls, Girl Scout insignia, barrettes, makeup, glittering confetti (another snow-echo) -- and then torn down by violation, sexual and otherwise. A gym teacher's inappropriate touch; a shoe salesman's remark; a friend's creepy dad; frottage on the commuter rail. All these things happen, in an era when such events were often considered not reportable offenses but just a part of growing up -- character-building, even.
''You can learn to eat violence,'' Ruthie philosophizes about her encounters with a classroom bully. But inevitably it will be disgorged in self-harm cloaked as self-soothing: hair pulling, nail peeling, unswallowed meals wadded into napkins. When the migraines arrive, with their blinding halos, it's almost a relief.
So masterly is Manguso at making beauty of boring old daily pain that when more dramatic plot turns arrive -- suicides, teen pregnancies -- they almost seem superfluous, visitations from an after-school special. The book is strong enough as a compendium of the insults of a deprived childhood: a thousand cuts exquisitely observed and survived. The effect is cumulative, and this novel bordering on a novella punches above its weight.
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Jacobs, Alexandra. "Finding Beauty in a Painful Childhood." New York Times, 7 Feb. 2022, p. C6(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A692135711/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b0fd9fd2. Accessed 26 June 2024.
Manguso, Sarah VERY COLD PEOPLE Hogarth (Fiction None) $26.00 2, 8 ISBN: 978-0-593-24122-6
A woman recalls her girlhood and adolescence through the lenses of family dysfunction and sexual assault.
The first novel by acclaimed poet and critic Manguso is a bracing coming-of-age story and master class in controlled style. The narrator, Ruthie, recalls growing up in Massachusetts on poverty's edge. Her father is snappish and distant; her mother's quick to judge and deeply narcissistic. ("The doctor said, Oh, she's beautiful, when he pulled me out, and my mother had thought he was talking about her.") As the story moves into Ruthie's teen years, the damage to her self-esteem begins to show: She's anxious around anybody she sees as her betters (which is almost everyone) and sees bullying and ostracism as her due. The plainspokenness of her voice--recalling early Ann Beattie and the dirty realists--at once underplays the tension and suggests just how tightly coiled she is. By the time she enters high school, she's exposed to a new ecosystem of sexualized mistreatment, from inappropriate touches to rape. Police officers, gym teachers, and family members all seem to be wired for exploitation. So her self-harm intensifies (she pulls out her eyelashes) alongside her awareness not just of sexual abuse, but of how common it is among those around her, which leads to the novel's powerful conclusive revelations. Manguso is a lovely writer about unlovely things--her previous books were built around lyric essays on suicide and autoimmune disease, and here she depicts her protagonist's quiet agony with a poet's eye. ("My shame fell from the ceiling like snow.") But the elegance doesn't diminish the emotional impact of her story and the journey of becoming mature enough to understand transgression, be horrified by it, and search for a means to escape it.
A taut, blisteringly smart novel, both measured and rageful.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Manguso, Sarah: VERY COLD PEOPLE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A690892293/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=428002fd. Accessed 26 June 2024.
VERY COLD PEOPLE
SARAH MANGUSO
208pp. Picador, 14.99 [pounds sterling].
Back in 2004, a slim volume, I Remember King Kong (The Boxer), caused a minor stir in South Africa. Its author, Denis Hirson, who emigrated from the country in the 1970s, had created a memoir, or perhaps a prose poem, by listing and describing various memories from childhood and later life spent in South Africa. The tone was mostly neutral, focused on the descriptive rather than the moral, as in: "I remember that Reg Park was Mr Universe, and that later he made Bokkie garden furniture". To South Africans of my generation, mental snapshots like these were astonishingly evocative of a moment, a place, a way of being.
Hirson's book came to mind throughout the first half of Sarah Manguso's disquieting debut novel, Very Cold People, because her narrator, Ruthie, also recounts her early childhood in the form of small shards of memory. Describing almost everything from the outside, via observations of behaviour and physical detail, she likes "to visit with the exhausted girl who once was me". Ruthie is living with her parents in Waitsfield, a small American town in which everything seems suspended, in limbo. Trying to climb socially, they have moved to an area above their station, and they don't understand the required rules and rituals. Shame is one emotion that does break through, and Ruthie's mother brings it on her daughter repeatedly. She is mentally unwell, a fact we realize before Ruthie does.
But something is wrong with Ruthie, too, or she would connect things better than she does. Her voice is affectless, remote, giving almost the same weight to every experience. Nothing distinguishes her recollection of, say, icicles, from that of, say, her mother masturbating on the edge of her chair. "My life felt unreal and I felt half-invested", Ruthie tells us. "I felt indistinct, like someone else's dream."
This oblique approach has its risks, because it seems to lack development. Only halfway through the novel, when Ruthie turns thirteen and the family moves to a new house, does the voice of the book finally deepen and till out. Yet even then it continues to tell its story in piecemeal form, one memory overlapping another. For Ruthie, and so for us, the disparate memories keep arriving, never fusing into a plot, simply relayed in a lightweight torrent of details.
Essentially, Manguso employs a technique normally used by novelists to give background information or to join one scene to another, but here it is the primary mode of narration. It is a brave choice, because the larger picture emerges only gradually, along with the understanding that, in Ruthie's world, there are no scenes, no foregrounded islands of meaning connected to one another; there are merely passing impressions. It would be easy for readers to lose their way, but Manguso is consistent in her approach and the cumulative effect is satisfying. She is performing a balancing act and there are only a couple of moments where she perhaps points up her meaning too obviously.
The writing is skilful and exact, and gives off the sense that its coldness is never truly cold. Manguso has published two collections of poetry and seems almost noticeably to be straining to keep the lyrical lid shut down tight, but her passion flashes through in occasional bursts of imagery, with their small emotional charges. Such moments come as a relief, signalling heat under the permafrost.
Likewise, one senses a fire under Ruthie's deadpan tone. Her voice may be disembodied, close to ghostly, but she also tells us it's a disguise. In her dealings with other people, she gives nothing about herself away. It is interesting that she reaches her highest rhetorical pitch in a fantasy about people she doesn't know--the previous inhabitants of the new house, and specifically a matriarchal figure, Winnie, whose set of bloody clothes Ruthie discovers in the attic. The blood could be that of a victim or a violent perpetrator, and Ruthie herself seems to relate to both possibilities. As she puts it, "I wanted to believe that Winnie was a murderess, because I wanted to have such power myself some day".
Meanwhile, Ruthie's story is one of double powerlessness, as a female and a child. Her lack of agency, her blankness, is reflected in the lives of other girls and some of the older women in the town, too, including her mother. They are "very cold people", not able to feel normal emotions, or perhaps to feel them normally. What has caused this damage, this inability to connect? Just as the question has come at us obliquely, so does the answer, hinted at in shadowy phrases, never expressly said. It is up to the reader to see the pattern in the carpet, because Ruthie never will.
Damon Galgut's The Promise won the Booker prize in 2021
Caption: Craftsbury, Vermont
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 NI Syndication Limited
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Galgut, Damon. "Patterns in the carpet: A visit with 'the exhausted girl who once was me'." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6211, 15 Apr. 2022, p. 17. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A701698141/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f6e144f0. Accessed 26 June 2024.